Overcast in mid-monsoon
bursting over ceaseless in rains
whirl-dancing dervishes
petals in ripple lakes,
chiming with the thunder
bridging heaven and Hades
hot a spring steaming here;
When we walk hand in hand
dimpled smile to smile
a hundred voices stream forth
in the bush streaking my cheeks
black unknown the hands of fate;
Flaming a firebrand dagger
dug into the earth will not heal
searing the roots, fuming stamen
in wilting flowers of the flame tree;
Dry the wells after all the tears
to the sky and beyond.
You are free, woman, of all
oppression, by force or love
unfettered be your spirit,
rage over me, dampen the soul!
Frame-holding an angst
disinterested at the edges,
rain, gail, storm in the soul,
withered trail of blossom fall:
spectral here sepulchered.

Rain, raining fury hail, wind
pouring wail, winds of despair,
for hope to dawn those for rain
who year long long hope for
the season stop be done for now,
neck deep cloud, is nigh enough.
Boats to our homes, forlorn paths
of water now bring all nature
to our lives, this is prosperity
expanding, when the firms paid
to hire our youths melt away
with the public works, here's
a bucket, collecting roof leaks
telling it's own noontime tale.
Walk miracle over the puddles,
giggling ******, ungoldy hour
this too will pass, surely, unfold
the mast of the darkening skies,
grey holding mountain pass, this
hedged path of the nigh stars.

Girl with the tribal tattoo,
tell me, what that on your arm left?
Lone, the wolf on the farm
totem ranging the dark,
we are of one kind;
Digging for them old spades
there at the Embankment,
we went wrong at the right turn
and still reached the end:
there was a bus for every misstep;
Posting you cards from abroad,
a mystery penny of a call;
Lost in a circle of smoke
not the signpost blame.
Late at night when the winds tiptoe
on roof tiles and you duck
into my arms unafraid;
Here we walk, hand in hand,
in the rain, now in the park
past the winter eve.
Girl with the tribal tattoo,
we are of one kind.
Old, the totem call of the night.
And the dragon writhes when
among them gongs amok
red the colour of the season new.

Dear Lord,

I thank you today for this gift of food. This, was another child of yours. Abel Abel Abel. An intelligent bird. A member in its dumb chain of life, family: what is family to that insentient mass? Do they mourn when one of them is gone? Does it affect them, does it bother them, does it pain them,

As it does to us? Yes, we, the great golden yardstick against which to measure out the universe.  Dumb, may be, but dumb life with a heart. Who knows about the soul. Isn't soul that little pin-***** somewhere deep in the heart? Do I have one? Do I care, do I mourn, do I see the pain that I cause to these fellow children of yours:

But if not this, what else - a leaf that covers in fear at being plucked, a root, a bulb that in ways we cannot sense with but an instrument, cries out in pain at being uprooted, skinned and roasted live. Or a fruit, that mothership, host to a million seedling lives, every one of them that could grow out to outlive my life by orders. A stalk, a branch, name it.

Yes, this is food. This is a chain. I eat and am eaten. Terrible, this creation, that has sprung from wellsprings of love. Or is not this world the product of a loving God, but that of the evil non-God? But where your omnipotence that is screaming through the scripture hoarse?

No, I am a sinner. I have sinned, to be born in this wretched world. A dead child was washed ashore, the other day. Until then, I said, to hell with those barbarians crossing rivers and mountains to reach my land. But what of death? I boil and burn a billion little lives in my glass of tea every morning, many times over. Oh plasmodium, that I have to **** to live, oh this life that hangs to me like a necessity!

Good Lord, have you made me in your image? What is, whose reflection in spacetime appears like this visage, flesh on ribage, beating heart, pumping lung, viscera and nerve and vein, bone and nail, wallowing in pleasure and pain? That is an inverse problem that baffles our genius. It is ill-posed for certain, with no means of regularization for sure.

I must live I must live I must live. ****, that organism is small, dumb, unintelligent, insentient, it's pain is of another kind, we can't eat air, and we are atop this chain, cobra's head, that houses all the venom. This is evolution, we are evolving space suits to head to the stars and spread the Gospel to those unknown realms still sunk steeped in barbarism.

Yes, He is great, he can be heard in the voices of lunatics that some times  get recorded and transmitted across the generations. And I follow the masters, they were vile, very vile, they were chosen, yea they were chosen, so vile is virtuous, I be vile, I be virtuous, I am chosen, yea, I am chosen, I head to God, on the backs of a thousand dead souls.

Amen. Peace to all those I consign and all the masters I quote. Holy Cain!

In the stark valley,
by wheezing winds,
eyes puckered,
hope, gone afar:

solitary peaks

snow-capped at
summit, rising,
parting the clouds,
for opal skies.

An aspiration.
A lighthouse.

Here where pits line the roads,
loss, we are so inured to in life:
wild-haired hero, when did you
go from warrior to zen master?

Breathing into the night,
the tricolour high:
we rose as one with you;
at the crest, now a vacuum
too hard to fill;

Now no artist the same,
that toils by sultry nights
in our backyard;
Who are you to us?

Lifting our spirits soaring
helicopter goes the sixer -
bouncing our sorrows off the park,
winning from death, the joy!

You are a memory
of the silvery night of hope
the miracle of faith
the tidal wave of belief
that engulfs adversity.

Go but you will never be gone
and a hundred such be born
in this your name, that in the stands
will yet never ring the same;

the morning comes to me endearingly,
like a severed kite topped in warm hues
the joy of netting a wandering kite,
strong in the wind and a string to bite!
Now the string, a song so lost -
to the left, the flame tree is in bloom;
to the right, and wild cherries rain;
and all the birds sing a refrain;
as the kite aflame in the faint light
distant whizzes in the sky,
blue smiling and jet waving back -
**** this hurried morning truck that
intrudes: before I see, now
she's gone, gone, now gone
flying far far away as her wont,
this lovely morning kite -
that I am now lying mourning

Far too many tides have you held him, Calypso, now let him go:
thus commands Athene daughter of Zeus, She who cannot stand his wails
any more. The fleet-footed Hermes delivers the writ of the heavens.

Does the wail of a mere mortal trouble the mighty Athene more than
the heart of her kin?  Will you Hermes not accept a bribe and tell Her you
never found me? That Calypso's home is too hard to find on sea?

The will of Zeus cannot be altered, bow or the bolt will make you kneel.
Twenty years has he suffered, let him go this prisoner of his deeds. Eternity  
awaits you: while his soul, death. Let him not regret his life in afterlife.

Thus did I leave on high-tide who steal to my own palace like a thief.
Twenty years play in my mind, but the strongest still is Telemachus's smile.
I leave her who cared so much to win my heart yet only the Zephyr -

Brought me cheer, that carried the smell of home and Penelope fair.
Here I leave the immortal who will die for me: for her who I know not if she
loves me yet. Who Athene brings don't fail me in life, even if they falter.

Love that is pain, the unspeakable
joy of the heart, a transformation

and here in this world cruel of men,
it is to love that is to suffer;

And so when you love with all your heart
with all your soul,  with all your mind
with all your strength,

so is the suffering sweeter the water
deeper the well, dug into the earth
where walked the prophets;

But we can die a hundred times on the cross,
for there is no love that does not heal, and

blessed is this sky under which
such a thing as love blooms;

Risen, we live, when in suffering we die, loving
such is the gospel of love we contemplate tonight.

Some say the Singularity comes in '45
some, not the name of a movie made;
Einsteins can sing till kingdom come, but
why there should be one, some can't fathom!
But for me, this is real,
every when you walk past then,
my heart rate's on Richter scale,
Singular girl, on orthogonal lane!
There must be those spaces
called Calibi-Yau, or I get and gone how?
Hidden dimensions that don't exist
except in those, your dimpled frowns?
I know now, our branes don't meet,
but while you want to differentiate
and love that done partially more,
at the horizon, calculus is mess!
Gravity girl, don't make me loop
this quantum dude, let it emerge,
the whole thing, all am asking
is for a meeting!

Walking past spiral arms of galaxies I hid myself in folds of a warped
reflected on the morning walls, timeline; deeds that filtered all light out.

Bent clocks, warped doors, stretched arms, Awash in the waves of your G-rays
But your song found me. bathed in sublime warmth;

I see your finger twirling universes out, I've seen your hand pick me up
your lips kiss the flaming skies. in every timeline I've walked.

Which manifold do you inhabit, I know you, time-traveler,
miracle-monger?

Hymns, hushed whispers,
a hundred jasmine buds,
the distant stars,
synapses.

She must have been a striking beauty
in her younger days - what features
those wrinkles fail to conceal, nor
her droop, her tall, elegant frame;
She walks with still-surviving pride
despite her humble job now - at this
old age, she still has to scrub and clean
for a meal a day: no regrets, she is
about her work, this noon hour by
the garden: why do we for greatness
look to colossal figures or the stars?
Greatness abounds around us - these
who work hard for their survival,
honestly, not lie or cheat their way.

The song of the ney blends
with the dunes:
as ancient paths
follow footsteps out,
into the wilderness of the desert,
seeking a truth greater
than constricted life settled allows;

The percussion of the drum,
missed heartbeats:
stopping at wells
dotting the scape, where,
the earth pours her agony forth
from her sorrowing depths,
the prophet's sons wept for God.

The grieving oases mourn
an unhealed
wound, of long
a heart searching the
sands, for one who gave his life
for the love of his Lord
here and his humble fellow man.

Rain snaps at the distance
one more wet dawn, I sit
longing by the porch,
as the leaves rustle

Of realms ethereal,
Senora, how would I
honour you in my
coarse, this peasant home?

Do not but assume this
frail form, that caprice can
find shelter, human
in you: I can't bear,

I will wait an aeon,
if only to grow eyes.

We think it's in the protection:
above, the vast canopy called Sky;
then we want freedom
when pervasive is intrusive
and seek shelter

Searching, we expend lives. Rain
finds a way in, we run seeking new.

We think this is unique,
then neither vast not endless,
but blobs floating in space:
it is in the beauty of illusion; then
disbelieve, hopping bruised on.

Neither in protection nor in freedom
nor in anything other;

Under the canopy again,
up on a hill, until
buried deep somewhere in us,
we see, it was there, all along,
and we grow up.

A raga of another time, from another day,
plays in the head:
grime of the day, stuck on my hands.

You shot an arrow across the eastern skies.
Senora, a hundred cries you carry
in your womb, yet I never
found you in the peasant woman
in whose arms I fell asleep, when
at noon you disappear at the horizon.

Maiden of the moons, at dusk I lost you
to the trail of lotuses blooming westward.

It is raining in gusts but this storm
cannot wash it away:
Guilt, like turmeric, stains the soul.

Holy yards of hallowed houses of prayer
rise in sublime chants and hymns
at this hour of the blessed dawn
when auspicious shades of light
grace the scabbards of swords
long sheathed and covered in shadows
of figures on the stained glasses

A divided land of long used to darkness
engulfing, rejoices: a saviour rises,
a hero who can unite and heal:
purple robe and the rag, Roman
and Celt: the long suffering realm
finds solace at last in order and justice;
A quest brews, of sacred chalices

In the noble hearts of faithful knights:
Alas, a tragedy in the shadows,
whither, famed Artorius, wise?
Hades schemes to ****** away
your Persephone to Annfwyn afar:
No mortal wounds could fell you alive,
But this, you carry on to Avalon.

3/4/20

On a precipice:
perseverant, undaunted
rises a prayer.

2/4/20

And we learned to live
to love, uphold, win, let go:
time starts after him/.

1/4/20

I emptied my mind
of fears and anxieties,
filled it with birdsong.

31/3/20

When the facade ends,
genies back in our head trunks,
the numb trudge back home

Go back home migrant,
time stops now and who knows when
it is unfrozen!

Mayfly season, now
death is in visitation:
and resurrection

Early morning calm,
feels like the eye of the storm:
yet, this too must pass.

30/3/20

Bougainvilleas
shy smiling, deserted street -
social distancing

29/3/20

Some adorn the trees:
this withering hour, others
deck the mourning earth

28/3/20

Automobiles? no -
this morning, warbler and finch
sing where thoughts crowded

28/3/30

Not that You are not -
but this darkness is mine, Lord,
so must be the light

27/3/20

Vivid light painting
the leaves and wings swishing by
emotions buried;

26/3/20

Budding leaves season -
this pause brings to life, whispers
and colours we missed

They led me to a chamber where
I heard you would be found,
and I returned shuddering and
baulking from the hall of mirrors

I hear your whispers walking with me
in the valley of flowers as in
the mirage-riddled path to the oasis

But fragrant pathways lead nowhere,
empty the nights of adoration

Dry of the sap of zest, barks that uphold
the canopies of our lives under the stars
And we hang paper flowers from them

where? when my call echoes in the winds,
you came and sat by my side, your warmth
entered in my soul. When I cast my blinds,
I find the world a hall of mirrors

On late the by-lanes one night,
unusual spot I green, a bottle
like any, but for words, may be,

on the label printed:
'Old wine. Hamlin. Best before: the future'

Scarred, the mouth, to fire
a rocket used, ringing in a day
when celebrating, a hero,
Goliaths thumped by a David new.

Hope, on the horizon, the word rising.

Threw it away, almost I, when
reversed comes, rolled up a parchment,
by ash burned, from the *******, a part:
a mix strange of clippings and retort.

Marked, astonished, the date, I: was it
from today, even of TV, a listings part;

'...mesmerized by the language of hope';
'Parks fill up as people gather to celebrate';
'Our democracy is alive and how'.

Of proportions messianic, news frothing
how new born, a leader is. Familiar all :
myself now, from one such, returning.

But curious, written, the words indeed:
'Monuments wear and rivers thin,
as boatmen sing the evening song,
miracle-workers and peddlers of
honey and mead, pipers at the gates
of dawn, not men of mettle and deed'

Of a piper, suddenly, as in a fantasy
a song, and heard I, helpless, wails
of mothers, a hundred .

Strained, to read, further my eye,
when tore up the piece;
Broke up green, a bottle on the street.

Long after, long after:
creeper retreating into
the darkness,
to the corners, after
the shadows repair,

I wake up: veiled face, now
tears into the silence, the
late swan's song of despair;

Silver, shines the tower
earring,
in the stray light
moon-streaming by;

Silken though, after
saker heaves and sighs nigh,
hanging by a thread,
we are, night-
threads spread bare.

On the far corner of my hall hangs a giant poster. Janeway is leading
her crew through the unknown. Spruced up so nice, you could
mistake it for a wall. My cupboard of skeletons. Beware, uncover the secret
at your own risk! Sometimes though, I wonder why we don't just accept:
aren't we all about the mean? Good man. On average, I am. White crows,
do exist! Everyone knows but crows are black. Of course the extent counts.
Of deviance I mean. But trust, you must.  I am a monkey that learned to
think. So are you.  I learn my religion, I learn my culture. I learn to act:
my part in the Play. Life is a rule-bound game we choose to accept.
I rebel too. When the rules aren't fun no more.  Isn't that true of me
as of you? Meantime, meanwhile, mean love. On the average lets seek:

I come floating to you Mother, dead on the river, body bullet ridden: this is how God reaps His harvest of faith.

See, those columns that support the sky now, carried once the roof of our temple. The fire burning the pyres now carried oblations to our ideals; But we face a jealous God consuming in wrath.

Here I come, un-wreathed, unsung, wet in the tears of the skies, skin carrying scars of resistance, eyes open to the tyranny of faith.

Clutch my hands, let me feel the love that birthed me, one last time before my Spirit moves onward and beyond to the worlds of light.

Let us go to Galilee
that four yard cell in Mathura,
deerpark in Varanasi,

and ask where are we headed?

Fallow the field we furrow.
Lost the harvests of our youth.

And when all's done, this
our fear, that it was not enough,
that it was not enough.

What does it mean to
love, find peace in works,
uncover the joy of existence?

(Mere) myth, delusion, infant
babble of an evolving kind?

On this humid summer night,
heartbreak is even more painful:
here you lie scattered
in trinkets and baubles.
Half your name on an airplane tag;
Old diary with
hurriedly noted recipes;
A bangle whose
other in pair is now lost;
The cherished handbag,
hidden away behind clothes;
That first scarf I bought for you.
You lie scattered like this
here, in every shadow and dream:
why, Spirits, this fate for us?

The peace pipe that has
two sides -

zoom the monsoon clouds,
summertime-bizarre.

Choices,
pieces of the peace puzzle:

Biblical, them both.

Pasts alive in
binocular introspection.

Smoking the hashtag#, now:

A hundred colour
abominations around.

Comrade, policeman,

look, our
daughters go abducted.

The last rain is dying
and the heat soars again:

Wand-love or rod-fear:

It's a battle of the faithful
in a heathen heathen world.

*#hash's so-sixties.

Is it the gulf of the night
that the wheezing winds
chafe at this separation?

now all events are memories
streaming in with the moonlight

walks past the frost-bitten lake
the snow, the snow, that
late winter night

I know there is a heaven
I felt its beat on my lips
pressed to your *****
arms wrapped in silken hair

there was no tomorrow.
a lone fall in the distant wood
all the trapping of time

I see you hair spread across the sky
on pensive nights
overcast in agony

there is no chocolate in the morning shop
no river bending
to measure your dimples out
no swan in our reed ridden lakes
unending summer now

and I long for the distant noon bell
song of the autumn shells
or the pall of looming life
wrapped in layers of the night
streaming past the crescent lights

Last bird, how cross you the distant
boundary beyond light?
In a circle of smoke I go
uttering her name the last of the words:
last splash of the high lake,
lisp of the winter wind,
words tail words, like water
emptied in the river and lake
retreating into the well
beyond them rocks deep
then into the heart of the earth
such is her name, buried deep
the unmarked borderland where
I must end and She must begin
incense-form fragrant her lips
that smell of nameless a love seeping in
across the vast, dark night;
it is the shadow of hooded fear
of being loved
that I wake up to in my nightmares
now I walk in the twilight
retreating, that upon us
the end of the day
kissed of her tresses

I was shipped across seas whipped and cuffed
Cattle, not human I of colour. Aeons on,
I was finding hope
in the life of a carpenter's son.
here comes hooded, undead.

born on a shore kissed of seas, I grew up the country hill
swimming rivers at dusk gathering berries for the stars.

gathered to mercilessness in death.

My skin was hide for shoe and soap.
Herded into camps I was worked to death.
For you believe therefore I am.

O veneer that wears thin on a whim,

to think that gods can walk amongst you.
gory, gory your glory

blessed vaunted humanity.

Here you are, holding court
in the sanctuary hewn of stone
in the depths of my hardened heart

I was searching  everywhere

ages congealed in the story of my quest
distant those memories flashing in lightning hues
when we made for you a throne in the skies
you were a king, being vast and a Son.
Fire,  light, word and the cosmos.
You grow with me,  beating with my heart.

so many tongues invented sacred,
each the supreme and the last perfect for all times
ending futile muted
that broke your icons but
fail to uncontain and unlimit your vast formlessness

Now after so much death and darkness

clad in the ashes of those endless cycles of dissolution
with your hosts, ghosts and goblins
in the silences sliced by cymbals and bells
at the pinnacle depths of being
Holding court here

fragrant the thicket –

this morning hour of blue mists,

hope blooms in the bush

The wave beating solitary on the shore
every once in an aeon, comes an hour
when the fuzzy bundle of timelines
must collapse to a certain certitude

Long hours of labours past the dark nights
that have borne their ends but not far
speak in hushed voices of defeat
and surrender, and dejection,
that it is all over and what else but

There, in the distance is a brewing morass
a descent into chaos and death, a war
that has no winner but the abyss

factions ranged, outweighed not by
their arms but destiny

that now threatens to ****** away everything
that a people fought to preserve memories of

on the  island where death rules the heart
this little patch of a shore
hidden away in the alcoves

the one hope of redemption

More and more you build
temples of stone.
Everywhere,
hewing rocks of the earth,
you set about your project:
But,
do you see -
that small bit of rock
would be enough, more
effective for Me to manifest,
all of a fist’s size,
this your hardened heart?

By the bonfire in the winter night
warming hands, a shadow

Dying muffled in the mist,
What about
my languid soul?

A hundred shadows echoing
in the wind beating in the wood:

How long this slaughter?
How long this pallid war
that nobody wants to end?

Hit, skirmish, dew-blood,
death and night,
and the stench at dawn.
How long?

Are you done smouldering,
firebrand? That from the ash
must rise a conflagration,

raining a harvest of ghosts
on this highway to hell.

The night is a creeper bent laden with brooding meditations and the mists of time:

Tonight, the moon is a distant jasmine bud; nascent fragrance waiting to pour into the world.

I've seen your work, magicienne, how you roll the stars out from your hat.

A wand wave, and the celestial chorus of chants and hymns pours out from the skies.

I've walked with you, on the old beaten steppe, pole star,
I've seen ships dock at ancient inlets of water
engorging in parched lands - they were reed boats before;
they were catamarans later, rafts and sailboats;

This is how we rose from the mollusc, seeking you in the stars;

When thunder strikes the lonely peak and rains wash our plains,
I've seen your footsteps, half-erased by the swelling riverbanks.

I was in your womb, and never afraid of the primordial waters. Yours, an umbilical love.

The clouds part for your evening sojourn through the western sky,
where the larks go forth spreading cheer.

I am the wood, the last refuge of all mysteries.
I am the clearing where a solitary home hangs in time.
I house all the antiquities.
I am the subtle space that hosts bubble worlds.
I am Hyperions.

Hypermart.
News on air.

Boondoggles,
owl ogles,
ongoing.

Jaywalking.

Reverse gear.
Biting into ginger.

Hindsight: familiar.
Slow down,
observant mirror.

Heartwringing.

Twigs
flying in a whirl.

Coiled up cord;
Snakes from the past.
Boondocks,

hornswoggling,
heartwarming.

The urchin banging at the car
on rainy nights,
begging for a buy;

The old house down the road
making way for another
highrise where no one will live;

The cobbler at the corner store
smiling away toothless
awaiting  his death;

The mausoleum of the hero
of the past - rebellion glorified
is the new tradition;

The aquarium where
water dried up
and the fish, all died;

I am the city that you
don't  see dying,
obsessed with 'progress'.

Yes, I am the same God
that dwells among you
Grace incarnate
again and again
in times and among peoples
various as the stars

if that mighty being
beyond all description
but experience
ever begat anything
it is but me,
me, love and grace

wherever the heart shrinks
and tyranny reigns
and lust and greed
masquerade as law
into that parched desert
do I descend, when
Jordan baptizes the soul

Ichthys of God, I make twelve
the anglers of fisherfolk
who cast their nets wide
and catch me in their soul
so they can behold
Him, that I am,

no greater miracle than this
was ever made

It is night now, and I am bloom all over.
Creeper crawling on earth, beneath:
the thicket of my blades, there lies
secret a crypt to eternity concealed.
I'm jasmine and I conceal a grave.

What is more deadly, say, concealment,
or the thing concealed? This is mystery.

I'm growing everywhere: by Himalaya
gazing at thunder cracking up the peaks.
By the well, where spake the Nazarene.
Clambering up to the heights of temple
towers, and kissing the eastern clouds.

But here is the whiff of fragrant endings:
concealment, more deathly than death.

Between dim lights behind and
the streetlamps below, here,
shades of darkness where
my shadow mingles with
those of the chairs and the vase,
the lamp, and the cyclic rhythm
of the shadow of the fan
that slices moments to pieces,
to the music of  the gushing waves;
As you are busy illustrating slices
of life down there, you Señora,
stand illustrated, in these loving
shades of grey and black;
Now the wind travels far
beyond where the sky in her tunic
adorned of stars takes a dip
in the sea; These clouds, like me,
travel miles to weep by this same sea
that washes their native shores.

beyond, here in these words
realms of the real
not
but unreal

sundering depths
reddening surreal
of existence

rending the veils

beyond the void-worlds

time is a drum-beat
that keeps kettlewarm
the count of life

awareness streams
beyond the ego-maze

where blossoms
the deepest bud
of the unwaning flower

that I hold to my *****
not as I,
not as I.

I sit holding a torch to the ingress
where your presence seeps into my soul:

is there more I can offer you, Senora,
Sovereign of all phenomena?

You shot in here, a quiver of birds, this
morning as the fires are burning down.

Shearing open the skies for crimson hues
of peace that now flood the quarters, after

the rains when roses have withered, I find
you stealing past the fragrant path westward.

I am become a lighted lamp, bowing
to you in every smile that greets the day.

And there, ascends the seraph winged of fire
into realms azure beyond ours
that here lighted our lives
with courage and dreams:

what humble the beginnings, that
we see not in humility of conduct,
what joy of the spirit
that does not come flooding into our hearts
and dream, that does not lift a people

that millions rise, ignited
heeding your call,
O King by demeanour,
in palace but a pauper with books,
and the rhythms of our souls

when parched for some,
wandered we
by the mirage wells of a nation
dessicated of hope,

oh Thou dispenser of our destinies,
did you not send a message
scribbled across a smile
that connected silver curls of age

that now leaves us broken
for we shall never be the same
until we meet you there
in realms azure beyond ours

Deluge tears, the storm clouds engulfing the wide world,
none to steady the canoe on the Galilee;

This the dust-path yoked to the burden of our deed,
beaten for teaching love, up the hill of penitence:

for here we traded the Spirit for passing gain,
calumny for mercy, who showed us the mirror

bearing witness, the wind heaving in the silence
we handed him over to the lash and the crucifix,

Yet, inscrutable this love for an ungrateful world
that parts the seas, and calls to life our faith dead,

pouring down, a heavenly stream though undeserved
carrying us across in arks and covenants

of long revealed in the dunes
ancient in the tongues
guidance
for our lives

read them in full
live them lines
as they our fathers did

rend them
meanings accrued
port not a port, nor a portal
nor a road a road
vessel a vessel

compendiums
codices, them
cross-references
exegesis

veiled must the woman be

between the simile and metaphor
spiritual and literal
lost in the dunes of these lines
the meaning

It is a morning like no other
when hope is smeared across the skies
Among the mourners I am alone
death cannot bind, when life could not.

A law binds us of old, to kinsmen
and clansmen, and the court
of law can be crooked
where evidence is omniscient.

In the chamber of faith
elevated on the altar
where we light pious incense
is the decorated image
of disbelief - for death
here, is the final word,

and who knows if there was
one in the beginning?

In the heart, the answer
where a wave knocks
of love, daring storms
and disregarding falls,
waiting to wash our feet
and cleanse our lives.

So are we here for a time,
on a sojourn we meet awhile:

Now darkness is overcast
and shadows grow on the walls
Now time is distant
and memories pale
But the miracle of your advent
never fades in my soul.

Against the canvas of green
churning out shades of wet brown,
silhouetted
the late crow atop a streak
of another bow of shadows. Canopy blue
islanded in many shades of grey,

ruddy ruddy grey:
crimson light dancing on the darkening tips
of leaves, still wet after the downpour,
fluttering in the slow wind;

Till you disappear from the edge
of my smudged mirror; Turning back
then, I wait on,
and catching a fading glimpse
of you walking away, for moments more.
Life inverted; Fluttering in wind.

Heavenly angels
that descended into the earth with the rain
burst forth now as the copperpods blooming
late now at season's edge

That at last when the night is
falling asleep, and I hear voices
muffled, concealed
in corners, oh my despair
the day breaks in, like a thief ambling
across, it is morning already...

take my hand, walk
with me to the lands beyond
the horizon,

tingling superposition of
pin-drops on the wet tile,
obelisks rising above the river bank,
shut temples to the god of love,
buried scabbard;
the nights of embraces,
red bus out of the mist,
the hymn to the autumn goddess;
curled serpent memories:
hiss-lurking behind -
and the bare bough
by the frost-bitten lake;

Saw me through and
I may flame out
like a flower ***,
hundred beads
of coloured smoke;

On the way, there can be a home
hooded go the nights
personalities, that seethe
worlds out of the keyhole

it is all the swaths
that people the in-betweens
of is and is not

I didnt know when you'd speak
why I'd feel as if,
now and then,
your voice was going muffled,
as in a flawed
television transmission?
I thought I must have been
imagining it all up;
Living out some
invisible, subterranean pain.
But, I see now:
you were a phantom;
You were never really there.
I must have
pinched myself harder

Dont talk to me about sense-vense -
do you, or do you not?
tell me this much;

Don't go zig-zag, jibber-jabber,
zither; look I don't care of
money-shoney,

this caste-vaste, mummy-daddy
and the society;

We could might never deny this,
pow-wows cannot measure this,

do you, or do you not?
That is, is all there is.